Can Karl Popper’s Principle of Non Falsifiability be experimentally falsified?

Question

I know things can be verified; I'm a Classical Realist. I know that Karl Popper's principle, however, cannot be tested by itself, and is thus a sophistry.

Answer 1

Karl Popper is a philosopher of science. Philosophy operates under different rules than science.

A claim in philosophy, such as "scientific claims must be falsifiable," is verified by agreement within the language, analogous to how to we agree on definitions. Falsifiability could be thought of as part of the definition of science.

It is pretty obvious that we get nowhere in science with unfalsifiable claims. For example, if I claim I have ESP, but it doesn't work in the laboratory because of the bad vibes of skepticism, I can protect my claim to ESP, but I have left the scientific method behind.

An unfalsifiable claim that I keep running into in popular culture is that homosexuality is predestined, i.e., genetically determined. I can point out that 62% of the identical twin brothers of homosexuals are not homosexual, or that former heterosexuals like Bishop Robinson become homosexuals and thousands of former homosexuals in Exodus go straight, and that 66% of homosexual men have had normal sex with a woman, but none of that counts against the unfalsifiable claim of homosexual predestination.

Unfalsifiable claims are held by sheer faith and resist all experimental tests. This puts them outside of the pale of science.

Cheers,
Bruce

Answer 2

The fact remains that in the real world, real science operates mostly by verification, and much less by falsification. In the ideological and infinite playing field of philosophy, verification may be seen as an incomplete unsolved puzzle, but in the real world, it is always a virtue.